Product description

This volume offers accounts of two of the 19th-century expeditions that took place in the so-called "heroic era" of Antarctic exploration. The first is Sir Douglas Mawson's 1911-14 Australasian Antarctic Expedition. The other is Ernest Shackleton's unsuccessful attempt to cross the Antarctic continent from 1914-16 and the extraordinary survival of his entire party after the expedition's ship, Endurance, was crushed and sunk in the pack ice. Chronicled in black-and-white images by the Australian photographer Frank Hurley, these two narratives are combined within this double volume. There is also an introduction by journalist and historian Tim Bowden.

Author information

Tim Bowden is the author of two books on Antarctica: Antarctica and back in Sixty Days, and the jubilee history of the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions (ANARE), The Silence Calling - Australians in Antarctica 1947-97. Charles F. Laseron was the Taxidermist and Biological Collector aboard Mawson's Australasian Antarctic Expedition Frank Hurley (1885-1962) ran away from home at 14 to work on the Sydney docks. He bought his first camera at 17, taught himself the technical aspects of photography and set up his own posteard business. In 1910 he persuaded Douglas Mawson to hire him as his expedition photographer. He later accompanied Shackleton on his Antarctic expedition of 1914. During WWI he took some of the war's only known colour photos, "small pieces of stark muddy misery."